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Printing and sRGB conversion from RAW files

Hi. I'm posting this in desperate hope that someone might have a solution for what's happened. Unbeknownst to me, ever since I have been photographing and editing my pictures digitally, I have been converting the RAW files in my workflow into sRGB instead of Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB. Whether using DPP or ACR, I have had the colour space set as sRGB, along with the colour profile in Photoshop. This wouldn't matter much unless I were trying to print images, which is exactly what I'm trying to do for an upcoming show, and I've come to realize that almost all of my files have visible banding in the background areas (very thin areas of much darker tone, reproducible on multiple different printers, with plenty of ink and clean nozzle checks and correct media settings, and a double-check to make sure there is nothing that I can see in the file) consistent with a problematic image file. After speaking at some length with a local photographer who knows far more about printing than I do, he deduced that the banding is from trying to print from an sRGB master file, which has far less information than an Adobe RGB and can't be recovered without starting over in the correct colour space from the very beginning. If I had the .CR2 raw files, that would be doable, albeit a lengthy process, but I haven't been in the habit of saving them, and as such, I only have two or three that I can reprocess from square one. The rest are saved as sRGB 16 bit TIFFs and, from what I've been told, that banding is from data loss that can't ever be brought back...it would be like starting with a jpg and then creating a TIFF from it. Once that data is gone, it's gone. But if I start with a 16 bit TIFF in sRGB, would making a jpg from that file in 8 bit sRGB perhaps mitigate the effect, or even clear it up? There's nothing to see at all on the screen, but as soon as the ink hits the paper, you can see the thin, dark bands in the background areas.

I'm curious if anyone here who prints has ever noticed this issue, and if so, if they've managed to find a workaround. Otherwise I essentially have an entire portfolio that's about to hit the recycle bin, since for my purposes, an image you can't print is about as useful as a plane that does everything except fly. Somehow I seem to have a handful of images that managed to escape being totally destroyed by the sRGB conversion and don't print with any banding, but they're a minority.